Feb
5
Last night when I was making my ToDo list for today I put on there, “Website Post”. I told myself I would make a post on here. The problem is today. I have nothing to post about. Other then I realized my entire wireless setup here at home goes nuts when a certain computer is on. I have my desktop, my laptop, both wireless, sending music/data to a printer wirelessly in the other room, and the music/video to the TV via an Apple TV. All is fine and dandy until I turn on my fiances old Compaq laptop. When I say old I mean she no longer uses it. It is honestly only less than a year old. For some reason that PC being on just causes all sorts of issues. To start it doesn’t think its on the internet when it is. The most annoying however is the fact that it causes the Airport Express to lose connection, causing the printer and music to stop working in that room, and causes the TV media to cut in and out/ or lose its connection. Its funny because I can have the two macbooks, the mac mini, the old dell 2200, and the XBOX on all at the same time and nothing cuts in and out, until that stupid compaq gets turned on. Just annoying. Just a rant.
Well, I went on an adventure tonight. Nothing to fun for most people but I found it quite entertaining. This PC had a “missing or corrupt” system hive file. Luckily the repair folder existed so I could boot to my good ol’ friend recovery console. Never realized the amount of copy and renaming that goes on during the repair of that but none the less after moving the repair keys to the config directory I could boot into safe mode. In which case I found a snapshot point and copied the keys in there to the temp folder. There I renamed them and then once again booted to friendly recovery console. From there once again delete the current hive files, copy the new ones from the snapshot back to the config directory, and now I can boot into regular mode. One more fun step to do a system restore back to the most current date. And Viola. Windows XP is back in business. Just thought I would share.
Over the last few months, and years actually, I have been removing those annoying pesky Scareware programs that pop up when your computer starts telling you that you have all these infections and offering to remove them if you purchase their software. Most of the time these programs look like and attempt to represent an Microsoft branded program. Occasionally they try and represent a legitimate antivirus company such as Norton. Once in awhile I’ve seen one trying to follow trending topics such as the Eco friendly “Green AV”. Then there are the ones that just look like a very crappy designed program with a horrible UI. The point i’m trying to get at is these things sneak by AV programs such as Norton, McAfee, AVG, etc., without being detected the slightest bit. My question is why. Most everyone of these Scareware .exe’s do the same thing. They are almost always an single .exe file hiding in either the programs folder, or the users ApplicationData folder. No big problem there. They are easy to find. My issue is that they all have been disabling the regedit.exe, cmd.exe, msconfig utility, and task manager. This is done by adding a couple of registry keys to the HKLM or HKCU hives. Thats pretty straight forward to fix. Find the Scareware .exe, delete it, remove it from the registry, then edit the registry to turn back on all of the preceding utilities. My question is why the big name AV programs can’t right a signature to find the one file .exe’s that are editing the registry and starting in the users shell or replacing the userinit.exe startup. Just curious. Thats all.
